TLERC History

Fitzgerald is the ‘roar’ behind the Lions’ eyeglass program.

His major role in carrying forward the Lions Clubs International “We Serve” motto is ensuring clear eyesight vision and preventing blindness in children and adults.

He said hundreds of thousands of eyeglasses have been distributed worldwide since the 1990s through the Midland-based Texas Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center.

“We help people who can’t afford vision help, (especially children) in dire need of glasses,” Fitzgerald said.

Until recently, the center was based at the Midland Downtown Lions Club’s Ike Fitzgerald Center west of downtown. The nonprofit TLERC Foundation now has its own 10,000-square-foot building in southwest Midland.

The eyeglass center also makes brand-new eyeglasses for “needy children that fall through the cracks” and for those who don’t have the means to get eyeglasses. Glasses for children are exact in meeting their vision needs, while recycled eyeglasses for adults are more an approximation.

“We do not want to put recycled glasses on children,” Mills said. “We (older adults) have lived our lives. These children are our future. We’ve got to take care of them as (best) we can.”

Fitzgerald said that the 1917-founded Lions Clubs International was inspired to take on vision as one of its projects after Helen Keller, rendered blind and deaf from a childhood illness in 1882, asked the Lions to become “knights of the blind in the crusade against darkness.”

In the late 1980s, a core of Midland Lions began “piddling” with the idea of recycling eyeglasses. Midland optometrists Drs. Norman Gould and Dennis Neely began teaching eyeglass recycling procedures to fellow Lions Gene Weinzel, Karl Reagan and Fitzgerald and Gould’s wife, Evelyn, and Fitzgerald’s wife, Sue.

By 1992, Lions Clubs International Foundation had designated five locations in California, Indiana, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin for its eyeglass-recycling centers.

Each week, about 20,000 pairs of donated used eyeglasses are processed in Big Spring after they are sorted out in Midland by workers, such as Shirley Harmon-Lay and Sandra Forward, who is legally blind.

“Dr. Gould put in a training program to do this work (in Midland),” Fitzgerald said. “One thing led to another” as the eyeglass-recycling program developed.

The Lions “couldn’t have done it” without the expertise of Gould and Neely, who determined the exact prescriptions, he said.

The Texas Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center has the “equipment that will obtain the refractive status of the eye, what doctors specify as prescription; a computerized laboratory” for making new eyeglasses for children, and equipment to read the prescription or refractive power of the eyeglass lens in fitting glasses to adults and children.

“The only way you will know (the joy of helping others) is to get involved,” Fitzgerald said.

“You can’t find a better place than this (eyeglass program).” (From a newspaper – Midland Reporter March 2013)

Ike Fitzgerald, 88 Lion since 1960 Midland Downtown Lions Club, Texas Ike Fitzgerald is multitalented. An aficionado of the bass fiddle and guitar, Fitzgerald joined the Midland Downtown Lions Club “mainly to play in the club band,” says Lion Marshall Cooper, a longtime friend. Fitzgerald is also a paramedic, a real estate investor and an automobile mechanic. He could master large amounts of information and possessed a keen memory. So, when he got involved in the club’s eyeglass recycling efforts, he set to work learning how to “read” the prescription level of donated lenses. “He would pump the doctors for every bit of knowledge he could get from them, then write all this stuff down and save it,” Cooper says. Fitzgerald then shared the information with local doctors, who accompanied club members on trips around the world. “He trained doctors who have gone overseas in how to ‘read’ the recycled glasses to fit kids who need them,” Cooper says. “Ike put a lot of time, energy and money—his money—into this.” With the help of Midland optometrist Norman Gould, Fitzgerald went on to launch the Texas Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center, one of the largest centers of its kind. Fitzgerald’s passion for providing the gift of sight, especially to children, is reflected in the first half of his email address: eyeglassike. “To this day, when he joins us at meetings, he is interested in getting the children’s programs throughout the world,” Cooper says. “He knows if they can’t see well enough to get a good education, they’re not ever going to succeed. Ike is a person who really cares about others.” Photo courtesy of Tim Fischer\Reporter-Telegram  (Oct 2015 Lions Magazine)